Maren Schmidt: Misbehavior meets needs

Misbehavior. That's when you don't act the way I want you to when I want you to.

But, what about when I do what I want when I want to do it? Some might call it personal prerogative. Others might say it's a double standard.

One of the interesting aspects of human behavior is that behavior is need-driven. Needs can be physical or spiritual, or perhaps a mixture of both. For example, our need for food fills a physical need, hunger, along with the spiritual needs of belonging, beauty, and more.

As long as we go about filling our needs in culturally appropriate ways, others consider us behaving. As soon as our needs inconvenience someone by creating an obstacle for the fulfillment of their needs, BOOM, our behavior transforms into misbehavior.

For our children, who have not yet learned the cultural nuances of conduct, these crashes and clashes of unmet needs can create disturbances that adults label as misbehavior.

Physical needs are the ones that we usually think of first when we are dealing with a clash of needs between child and adult. Is the child hungry, tired, sleepy, cold, etc.? And perhaps the adult, too?

No wonder grandmothers around the world want to feed crabby people. Cookies with milk, along with predictable meal and bedtimes, keep life on an even keel. Taking care of our physical needs avoids considerable conflict.

Meeting spiritual needs becomes trickier and more complex as spiritual needs involve the intellectual, emotional, physical, as well as the spiritual parts of our beings.